"alternatives" versus PATH

[Edwin Olson]

Fedora has shipped "alternatives" for a while now, but I still don't get it.

Why is "alternatives" better than setting your PATH appropriately? Why 
should "alternatives" override your path?

The notion of having an "editor" symlink which points to vim/emacs seems 
okay at first, but in practice, who's not going to just type 'emacs'?

If "alternatives" exists for the convenient use of users, I think that 
the UI needs work. Every time I need to configure a new alternative, it 
takes me quite a while to figure out what all the appropriate flags are 
(in particular, the "link" field seems to require knowledge of where 
"alternatives" is storing its directory of symlinks-- shouldn't this be 
automagic via a alternatives configuration file? The result should be 
that you would only need to provide name and path.)

I ask these questions sincerely hoping for answers-- I'm not trying to 
be difficult. At the moment, it seems like it'd be saner to NOT have 
alternatives, since I don't see what advantages the extra hoop-jumping 
yields.

-Ed

PS: My latest experience went like this:

1. installed sun jdk to /opt/jdk
2. export PATH=/opt/jdk/bin:$PATH
3. cd into one of my java code bases
4. ant
5. gcj is invoked by ant, apparently due to alternatives.
6. gcj can't compile my code and I'm sad.